For Immediate Release
Wednesday, May 24, 2017
Contact: David Jacobs
212-965-2255 / [email protected]
NAACP Legal Defense Fund Statement on New Research Showing an Increase in School
Segregation in the South
Earlier today, researchers at UCLA and Penn State released Southern Schools More Than Half a
Century After the Civil Rights Revolution, a new report reviewing segregation trends in Southern
public schools between 1970 and 2014. The report concludes that the significant gains in school
integration made after the civil rights movement are now being reversed, with an increase in the
number of Black and Brown students who attend intensely segregated schools. NAACP Legal
Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. President and Director-Counsel Sherrilyn Ifill released the
following statement:
“This incisive and important new report makes clear that 63 years after Brown v. Board of
Education, we must make a renewed commitment to ensuring that every child in America has
access to quality, integrated schools. As this research shows, strong federal support for integration
had a meaningful effect on public schools in the decades after Brown. But that support has waned
in recent years, endangering the real progress that was won during the civil rights era. And with
the current administration in Washington lauding the importance of ‘school choice,’ the danger of
abandoning our public schools to greater segregation has only grown. We must not fail Black and
Brown students by refusing to heed what we already know: that separate is inherently unequal.
This report is a call to action, one that we simply cannot ignore.”
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Founded in 1940, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) is the nation’s first civil and
human rights law organization and has been completely separate from the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) since 1957—although LDF was originally founded by the NAACP and
shares its commitment to equal rights. LDF’s Thurgood Marshall Institute is a multi-disciplinary and
collaborative hub within LDF that launches targeted campaigns and undertakes innovative research to shape
the civil rights narrative. In media attributions, please refer to us as the NAACP Legal Defense Fund or LDF.